PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Benoit Facon AU - Abir Hafsi AU - Maud Charlery de la Masselière AU - Stéphane Robin AU - François Massol AU - Maxime Dubart AU - Julien Chiquet AU - Enric Frago AU - Frédéric Chiroleu AU - Pierre-François Duyck AU - Virginie Ravigné TI - Joint species distributions reveal the combined effects of host plants, abiotic factors and species competition as drivers of community structure in fruit flies AID - 10.1101/2020.12.07.414326 DP - 2020 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2020.12.07.414326 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/07/2020.12.07.414326.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/07/2020.12.07.414326.full AB - The relative importance of ecological factors and species interactions for phytophagous insect species distributions has long been a controversial issue. Using field abundances of eight sympatric Tephritid fruit flies on 21 host plants, we inferred flies’ realized niches using joint species distribution modelling and network inference, on the community as a whole and separately on three groups of host plants. These inferences were then confronted to flies’ fundamental niches estimated through laboratory-measured fitnesses on host plants. Community structure was mainly determined by host plants followed by climatic factors, with a minor role for competition between species sharing host plants. The relative importance of these factors was mildly modulated by host plants. Despite overlapping fundamental niches, specialists and generalists flies almost behaved as separate communities, with possible competitive exclusion of generalists by specialists on Cucurbitaceae and different assembly rules: specialists were mainly influenced by their adaptation to host plants while generalist abundances varied regardless of their fundamental host use.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.